Open Primaries

Friday, November 11, 2011

Ian Ferguson: Get Rid of Party Primaries Altogether

OPEN PRIMARIES

Committee Lotteries, Open Primaries, Extended Term Limits: 3 Ways to Curb Partisanship (Ian Ferguson, PolicyMic - Next Generation News and Politics) Parties can’t be forced to have open primaries as this would leave them both open to raiding, where members of the other party flood a primary and vote for the weakest candidate. To solve this, we should get rid of primaries altogether. Allow anyone who can meet the requirements to run for an office to do so. This would, of course, require two elections: One to whittle the field down to two candidates and another final election. This would allow the general electorate greater options in candidates and force the final two candidates to woo the voting groups of those who failed to make it past the first round.

Recall in Arizona - What Tuesday’s mixed electoral results really tell us (National Review Online) Firstly, Shadegg explains, “It is very important to understand the procedural differences between this election and a normal election” — which made it meaningless as an electoral barometer. The race functioned essentially as an open primary, with the only choices on Election Day being two Republicans: Pearce, and a slightly more moderate, but hardly centrist, Mesa accountant named Jerry Lewis. Shadegg argues that this means “the more moderate of the two candidates gets a huge leg up.” By the median-voter theorem, Lewis would win inevitably, so long as he was slightly more moderate than Pearce. Such a dynamic applies in a contest like this one, in which the “extremist” Republican is inevitably not the median-voter choice, but won’t apply to other races, in which a Democratic opponent is no more likely to be closer to the median voter than the Republican.